Francis Crick: A thoughtful biography to savour “His aim was not just to make discoveries about two of the major riddles of science, he was also driven (…) to understand our true place in the Universe, shorn of superstition and religion.”

Lovely review of CRICK by Peter Lawrence - who knew Francis well and took the photograoh below - in @currentbiology.bsky.social. “Scintillating… a biography to savour.”

Join us! 🧬🪰🎉🔬

We are currently advertising two #PhD projects to study the #evolution, #development and #genomics of sexual traits in stalk-eyed flies.

Deadline for applying is Wednesday, January 7, 2026. Get in touch for more info!

First growth, then information: the path to genetic heredity in protocells Most theoretical work on the origin of heredity has focused on how genetic information can be maintained without mutational degradation in the absence of error-proofing systems. A simple and parsimoni...

A rare posting from me, on the Origin of Life - a fundamental constraint in the emergence of genetic heredity www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Why did I take Zoology at Oxford, because of read Niko Tindbergen

We never did get a date in the diary. Try again

Oh shit, again.

Who cares about ageing. I do!

👍🏼

A gamble worth taking

Which one

Evolution of Wolbachia male-killing mechanism within a host species Male-killing bacterial symbionts, prevalent in arthropods, skew population sex ratios by selectively killing male progeny, profoundly impacting ecology and evolution of their hosts. Male-killing is a ...

Evolution of Wolbachia male-killing mechanism within a host species

"In vitro and in vivo data demonstrated that wBol1Y (Wolbachia) feminized splicing and expression of lepidopteran sex determination pathway genes."

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

A new opportunity to work with our expanding #eDNA and #biodiversity lab as a postdoc looking at human impacts across space and time with terrestrial airborne eDNA. UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship funded opportunity based at the @ucl-pnl.bsky.social: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

A phylogenetic approach to comparative genomics Nature Reviews Genetics - Controlling for phylogeny is essential in comparative genomics studies, because species, genomes and genes are not independent data points within statistical tests. The...

Our review is out in Nature Reviews Genetics! rdcu.be/d5AY2

We show how phylogeny-based methods can resolve the problem of non-independence in genomic datasets.

These methods must be considered an essential part of the comparative genomics toolkit.

@lauriebelch.bsky.social @stuwest.bsky.social